Scanning books, magazines, and other printed material into digital form has become common with the advent of improved imaging, storage and distribution techniques. Although many types of unbound printed material can generally be scanned with relative ease using automatic page-feeding mechanisms such as those commonly found on digital copiers and scanners, some types of unbound documents and most types of bound documents present additional challenges.
Various mechanisms have been developed to enable the scanning of bound documents. For example, a traditional flat-bed platen scanner scans bound documents in a face-down position. However, for best results, a flat-bed scanner typically requires the application of force to the spine or binding of the bound documents to insure that the pages come within the scanner's depth of field. Such force can damage the document. In addition, using the flat-bed platen can be tedious and time-consuming, as the bound documents typically must be lifted and repositioned after each page is scanned. Further, image quality is often poor due to loss of focus, uneven illumination, and distortion caused by page curvature in the vicinity of the binding.
An alternative to the traditional flat-bed platen scanner is a platen-less scanner that captures image data from a bound document in a face-up position. Such scanners typically provide a cradle assembly supporting the document during scanning. An operator can place a document on the cradle assembly and manipulate the cradle to ensure that the pages are in an image capture device's field of view. However, such manipulations typically require two-handed manipulation. These actions are tedious and time consuming, and can lead to errors or poor image quality of the resultant scans.